I am a Senior Political Contributor at Forbes and the official 'token lefty,' as the title of the page suggests. However, writing from the 'left of center' should not be confused with writing for the left as I often annoy progressives just as much as I upset conservative thinkers. In addition to the pages of Forbes.com, you can find me every Saturday morning on your TV arguing with my more conservative colleagues on "Forbes on Fox" on the Fox News Network and at various other times during the week serving as a liberal talking head on other Fox News and Fox Business Network shows. I also serve as a Democratic strategist with Mercury Public Affairs.

After making a big deal of publicly supporting the Affordable Care Act, Walmart—the nation’s largest private sector employer—is joining the ranks of companies seeking to avoid their obligation to provide employees with health insurance as required by Obamacare.

It was not all that many years ago that Walmart announced, in response to harsh criticism over the low pay provided to Walmart ‘associates’, that the company would provide a healthcare benefit to its part-time, low earning employees. The uncharacteristically generous nod to worker needs was short lived as the company partially pulled back on the commitment in 2011, citing premium rate increases that Walmart deemed beyond their capacity to pay.

Now, Huffington Post is reporting that the party is over for many more existing Walmart employees, along with all employees hired after February 1, 2012 that the company can classify as “part-time.”

According to the 2013 Walmart “Associate’s Benefit Book”— the manual for low-level Walmart employees—part-time workers who got their jobs during or after 2011 will now be subject to an “Annual Benefits Eligibility Check” each August.

Employees hired after Feb. 1, 2012, who fail to average the magic 30-hours per week requiring a company to provide a healthcare benefit, will lose their healthcare benefits on the following January. Part-time workers hired after Jan. 15, 2011, but before Feb. 1, 2012, will be able to hang onto their Walmart health care benefit if they work at least 24 hours a week.

Anyone hired before 2011 will not be cut off from the company provided health insurance.

Of course, Walmart carefully controls employee work schedules and will have the opportunity to design worker hours in a manner that will keep employees at a level below the threshold required to accomplish company healthcare benefits pursuant to the law.

While there have been increasing reports of American employers reacting to the requirements of the Affordable Care Act by making plans to cut employee work hours so that these companies may deny health insurance as a benefit of employment—particularly in the restaurant and fast food industries—it appears that Walmart has been planning this move all along.

How else can you explain why, as early as 2009, Walmart surprised us all when they publicly expressed their support for Obamacare by joining with such unlikely partners as the Center For American Progress and the SEIU labor union to promote the passage of the Affordable Care Act—only to now use the law as a tool for ridding itself of the obligation to provide a healthcare benefit for many of its associates?

In a letter to President Obama, dated June 30, 2009, Walmart wrote, “We are for shared responsibility. Not every business can make the same contribution, but everyone must make some contribution. We are for an employer mandate which is fair and broad in its coverage, but any alternative to an employer mandate should not create barriers to hiring entry-level employees. We look forward to working with the Administration and Congress to develop a requirement that is both sensible and equitable.”

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Wal-Mart did not “stick taxpayers with employee healthcare costs”, by bailing on Obamacare. It’s not like they passed the law. The US Federal Government is sticking taxpayers with Wal-Mart’s employee healthcare costs. They aren’t Wal-Mart’s bills to pay, nor are they ours as taxpayers.

Obama’s utopia of health care is flawed by his and Congress inability to realize the thin margins come companies deal with and that paying a set penalty is way better then offering a health plan to lower wage earners. Most of us who know much about business knew this would happen. Rather then fighting business liberals should better learn to understand it. So that their government ideals actually work and not back fire. Too much distance in government thinking between what is business and what they think business is.

Rick, you seem to missing the other side of this delightful manipulation of loopholes. what happens to Walmart’s competition? you know the smaller, but still big companies, who’s only leg up on the Wal is that they employ better people by offering full time employment and pay at a reasonable salary.

THEY GET SCREWED!

suddenly the price of providing the quality of employees that requires pay above the poverty line goes up even more for these companies, and they can either 1) increase their prices making the Wal’s prices look even better of 2) start hiring people who are the quality of Walmart and lose their only advantage.

its a double win for Walmart and for the destruction of the middle class. long live the welfare nation!

this would be hilarious if it wasn’t so sad. and of course you’ll say “what’s the only way to fix this huge mess up of the government? more government interference! universal healthcare for all!”

Come on Forbes, have a heart. Alice Walton needs another couple billion (to add to her $27 billion portion of the Walmart fortune) to keep her vanity project museum in the middle of nowhere open. It’s a tough choice: Health care benefits for thousands of employees whose hard work lines her pockets, or more art for the residents of a small town in Arkansas. The choice is clear.

Corporations and people respond to incentives. The main incentives corporations respond to are financial. The Obamacare law creates an incentive to hold some workers to a maximum number of hours in order to avoid a costly benefit. I don’t expect that most large companies are going to convert all their salaried and full-time hourly employees to part-time status, but they now have a strong incentive to keep workers with variable hours from exceeding the set threshold. The cost of a small difference in actual hours could be high, so they will implement policies to be sure it doesn’t happen.

The real solution is to get the economy moving and tighten up the labor supply. Businesses tend to offer the pay and benefits they need to in order to recruit and retain employees. If the labor market gets more competitive, employers won’t be able to offer benefits packages that aren’t attractive to those they want to hire or retain.

Rick, you are correct about Walmarts responsibility as an employer, but ironically Walmart’s actions result in an acknowledgement that Single Payer is the the family’s choice for their employees. Call it a vote for Universal Healthcare. Maybe, if they already haven’t, they will sweeten that with the “offer” of a lowest-price-at-the-register Medicare Advantage Plan. Walmart is controlling schedules as you note to make more employees part time. But at some places, only the classification has changed. I am informed by friends working at Radio Shack who have been cut back to part time classification at 20 hours per week with benefits removed, that they are still required by their position to put in 40 hours.

The SCOTUS struck down the state mandate, so we owe them all of the . . .ahem. . .credit for this debacle. Time for a single payor option, President Obama, which is what We The People who care about the health and welfare of our fellowman/woman and child wanted all along.

In the near future, every American worker, but those in managerial positions of importance will be part time workers.

Already several companies in our area have told their workers that they will be cutting them back to less than 30 hours per week in order to avoid having to pay for insurance, because they cannot afford to pay for the insurance or pay the penalties that they will be accessed if they do not provide their employees with over 30 hours per week with employment.

In fact, one company has went as far as to tell their employees that they will dividing workers into teams that will all be all be part-time employees with two workers in each team performing the same job, with one working three days one week and two the next, alternating each week, and since both of those people will be paid ever two weeks, neither will get over 40 hours for those two weeks. In other words, people are going to have to work two weeks to earn the same pay that they would have earned in one week before, and only earn half as much on a yearly bases. Yet, they will be forced to provide for their own insurance on half the pay they once earned. Still even by working this system, the company will be maintaining the same amount of productivity as they did with half the employees previously, and paying no more than they did previously for the employees wages. Pretty innovative, a?

We will see more and more of this creative type of employment scheme in the coming weeks and months as companies adjust to the need to avoid paying insurance, and the penalties they would pay by not providing insurance.

Of course, this is going to make the employment numbers go down because many companies will be hiring more employees. Which will make it look as if Obama has cut the unemployment numbers in half. Even if the majority of jobs will be part-time jobs of less than 30 hours per week, and many of them will be minimum wage jobs. Workers will have to try and find two jobs that will interact in order to maintain a 40 hour work week.

The overall effect of these actions will be that many families will find themselves at or near the poverty level because of them not being able to find full time work, or jobs where they can work two jobs, and maintain a 40 hour work week. This cumulative effect will be the further deterioration of the middle class.